Creative Commons

May 30th, 2015

In any software project, we need to understand the people who will use the product. There are many different points of view onto what approach we should take.

Spool: Vision, feedback, culture

Some promote approaches to usability practice alternative to User Centered Design. Spool (2008, 2009) calls the attention of the usability community to the risk of accepting methodologies blindly, of following them as dogma. Instead of measuring the results, he says, usability practitioners tend to focus on convincing people: “We are following the right methodology, so the product must be good”.

Instead of UCD, which he argues never worked, but leads to people following the process blindly, he encourages what he calls informed design. This is a reward system for any design activity such that the effectiveness of the activity can be measured.

Spool states having researched successful and unsuccessful interaction design projects. He claims having found three quality attributes successful projects had in common: a long-term user experience vision, a working feedback loop, and a culture of encouraging design failure.

“Vision : Can everyone on the team describe what the experience of using your design will be like five years from now?” (Spool, 2008, 2009)

The point here is that you have a larger goal, and when you take daily baby steps in your design, you can tell whether those steps are towards what you’re aiming, or not. This seems to also facilitate consistency, as everyone in the team are supposedly aiming for the same, shared goal.

“Feedback : In the last six weeks, have you spent more than two hours watching someone use yours or a competitor’s design?” (Spool, 2008, 2009)

The usefulness of feedback from actual users is rather obvious. Spool seems to stress the importance that everyone in the team have the experience of seeing real users use your design – supposedly, in order to remember just how differently real users perceived your design than you did.

The reason Spool argues for six weeks as the maximum amount of time one should be allowed to not sympathize with users, is that according to him, after that time memories fade. In an online, distributed development environment, we want to regularly expose developers to perceptions about how users experience their designs.

“Culture : In the last six weeks, have you rewarded a team member for creating a major design failure?” (Spool, 2008, 2009)

Here, Spool argues that encouraging failure results in a culture of learning from that failure, instead of making contributors ashamed or afraid of mistakes. This also seems to facilitate creativity and trying also experimental design ideas.

Regardless of the validity of Spool’s criticism against UCD, his propositions for things to include when designing for our actual users look useful, because they can be adopted seemingly without burdening the team with a heavyweight process.

Open source, for example, has been considered loosely a form of distributed participatory design (Barcellini et al., 2008; Terry et al., 2010) . Participatory design is concerned about democracy at work and about democracy in design. In its roots then, its approach to design is quite similar to the ideals of open source (Nichols & Twidale, 2003), where transparency of the development process is a key value.

Participatory design

Contrasting participatory design with UCD where the focus is on researching the users so that designers can make better design decisions, participatory design seeks to empower users as decision makers in the design process itself.

Researcher-designers are thus expected to facilitate user-designer cooperation instead of representing the users (Iivari, 2009) . Ehn (1993) approaches the question of communicating understanding about the intricacies of work, between designers and users, in terms of wittgensteinian language-games:

“If designers and users share the same form of life, it should be possible to overcome the gap between the different language-games [of users and designers]. It should, at least in principle, be possible to develop the practice of design to the point where there is enough family resemblance between a specific language-game of the users and the language-games in which the designers of the computer application are intervening. A mediation should be possible.” (Ehn, 1993, p. 70)

Within the domain of participatory design there are techniques, supposedly helping both users and designers see “other person as partner” instead of “other person as problem”, recognizing the differences in perspective of different stakeholders (Allen et al., 1993). Also in the context of an open source project, users and developers have different language-games. Participatory design explores the conception that making mediation possible between those language-games facilitates design and user participation through enhanced communication.

Erickson (1996) discusses telling stories, considered perhaps an initial, less formal alternative to scenarios , as a similar “equalizer” of different participants of discussion, since storytelling requires no special skills. This comes very close to the challenge of involving users in development that seems to have a culmination point in open source development.

An open source community indeed engages users at a level of discussion. Observation of users in their real working environment is difficult – and sharing those observations in a way that engages the community (such as a video narrative illustrating users’ environments) raises privacy issues – and again, is very time-consuming. Thus, the notion of a solution encouraging users to further participate in the design instead of being observed is a very tempting one.

However, Iivari (2009) states that in the OSS project she studied, users do not have actual decision making power regarding the OSS but are left in a consultative role. This seems to be true of most OSS projects. Ultimate decision making is left to developers only, to whom a very limited amount of understanding about the users of the software is available in the forums of the community (Iivari, 2009).

In OSS projects, user involvement is thin from the perspectives of both UCD (no usability practitioners to represent users) and participatory design (the few users who do participate have no true power over the eventual software). Warsta & Abrahamsson (2003) have studied the similarities of agile methodologies and open source development. Sy (2007) builds a case for agile as an efficient framework in which to employ user-centered design.

Further research could reveal whether these approaches might also be applicable to open source development. So central questions, yet ones without clear answers, seem to include:

Is there a way UCD understanding could enrich the natural way OSS projects learn about their users?

Could usability practitioners plug in to the community’s existing means of communication, finding fruitful points of contact with the community while using methods favoured by UCD, such as ethnographies, to fuel design?

Or should we perhaps concentrate on what seems to come naturally to an OSS community, and only refine user research methods to be based on the open source community’s feedback?

November 19th, 2010

I am currently working on a private software project in a startup. I am involved not only in the design of the overall user experience, but also in implementation, since we are not many. The temptation to skip usability work is great for our team of two, and I too have to keep convincing myself why usability work is absolutely crucial to product success. Trying to find a succint enough way to express the basic needs for the work…

Software engineers often question the value of usability work. It may be that a good designer could design a UI that does not create major confusion for most – if those designers already have lots of experience from usability testing in other projects. However, in any application that is done without explicit user research and usability testing targeted for the specific UI, you tend to have dozens of small confusing moments that make up the overall user experience and lead to a general ‘yuk’ reaction. Not to mention that if you don’t intimately know your users’ goals, you are likely to be designing the wrong overall application.

Summary of reactions: >60 Twitter tweets total including all links, grade Eximia Cum Laude Approbatur, honorary mention in the thesis competition (link in Finnish) of ACM SIGCHI Finland. The work continues!

Update (Nov. 18 2011): This thesis won an honorary mention in the thesiscompetition (links in Finnish) of the Finnish chapter of SIGCHI ! Yay! Their statement of the thesis: “The jury thought this as a new type of thesis work, which successfully captures the phases and challenges in a multi-phased process of redesigning a Moodle community application. Open source communities have been little investigated from the HCI point of view, and the author successfully opens interesting new viewpoints with the thesis. The constructive Pro Gradu thesis has also resulted a tangible contribution.”

Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) development has become an important way of producing software in the modern society. In principle, the source code produced as OSS is openly designed, developed and distributed, and developers take part in the process voluntarily. The resulting code is freely or with little cost available to end-users. Often the software developers and users are from all over the globe, with the OSS community applying virtual forums for questions and user feedback and support.

Taking part in OSS projects often poses challenges and obstacles to the usability practitioner whose main interest is to design the user interface so that it better fits the user needs. This is the topic Olli Savolainen deals with in his thesis. He reports on his personal motivation and continuous interest in improving the quality and, in particular, usability of Moodle Quiz. He also refers to his efforts and perseverance in gaining acceptance in the community before the changes he suggested after several iterations finally got accepted into the code base of Moodle 2.0. The description of the project is given on two levels. While reporting on the actual user centered design work done in the various phases of the project, another, more personal account of the challenges encountered on the way and reactions to them is unfolded. This kind of reflection is very valuable for understanding the norms, values and ways of working in FLOSS communities. These are important for gaining acceptance and recognition as an active FLOSS participant.

The thesis is a well balanced and reflective document of things learned and practiced in the Quiz UI project as well as thinking about them in the larger framework of OSS development projects as described in literature. The background literature cited is extensive, ranging from books and journal & conference papers to blog and discussion forum entries and documentation. Furthermore, it is well utilized throughout the thesis.

The vocabulary in the thesis is versatile and the language in general grammatically correct, though professional proof reading and language checking might still improve it. A minor drawback in the thesis is the structure that promotes the feeling of repetition, since some issues are first introduced in Chapter 2, but discussed in more detail in Chapters 7 and 8 with many cross-references between the sections. However, this is only a mark of thoroughness and consistency in reporting.

Olli Savolainen has been involved with Moodle and the Quiz UI for more than three years, and his skills and expertise are apparent in the thesis. The main findings are based on personal work experience, and they smooth the usability practitioners’ path into OSS communities. The thesis work is relevant to future OSS development practitioners. It unites the fields of software engineering and usability engineering, bridging the gap still observed in computer science education.

The work carried out by Olli Savolainen clearly fulfills the standards set for a thesis in Interactive Technology. We propose that the thesis is accepted with the grade eximia cum laude approbatur.

At the department of Computer Sciences, September 9, 2010
Saila Ovaska
Eleni Berki